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The Text in This Class: Stanley Fish and the Leibnizian Mind

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The Text in This Class: Stanley Fish and the Leibnizian Mind The Text in This Class: Stanley Fish and the Leibnizian Mind Jonathan Michael Dickstein Interpretation seems to be the technique by which human beings evaluate a given object. The interpretation of a literary object, then, would seem to entail a given understanding of this object. Put differently, the interpretation of a text would seem to entail a pre-interpretative understanding of this text: its description. However, such reasoning, which certain literary critics— namely, the formalists—presuppose, faces a serious refutation. In what fol- lows, I formulate this refutation with the help of Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in This Class? (1980) and relate it to a trajectory of early-modern phil- osophical thought, evident in the works of René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz. This enables me to specify the shortcomings of the formalists’ rea- soning, to complicate Fish’s refutation of it, and to attempt to provide a pre- liminary ground for a consistent method by which to interpret texts. Imagine that you are a student of literature. Your assignment is to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925). You open the novel. The first line manifests itself: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”1 For you to interpret this line, formalist critics would argue that the text must exemplify certain definite properties, such as, grammatical, syntactical, and semantic values.2 For instance, “Mrs.” is a title (a type of proper adjective), which describes proper nouns for humans (first and/or last names) as fe- male and married. “Dalloway” is a proper noun. Given its relationship to the proper adjective “Mrs.,” it must indicate the name of a married woman. Since “Dalloway” is not a common first name for women, it likely refers to COLLOQUY text theory critique 27 (2014). © Monash University. ░ The Text in This Class 73 the last name of one. The non-linking verb “said” demonstrates the primary action of “Mrs. Dalloway”: speech. Moreover, it designates the time of this action: the simple past. The content clause, “she would buy the flowers herself,” then describes the topic of this action: a possible exploit or, more specifically, the alleged self-funded acquisition of a set of angiosperms. Ac- cording to formalist critics, you, as a reader, must recognise and then re- veal these definite properties of a text. Other critics, however, against the formalists, suggest that this recog- nition depends on a reader’s particular social, moral, and/or psychological convictions insofar as such convictions immediately inform any experiences a reader has of a text. For instance, in Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Stanley Fish argues: “an interpreting entity, endowed with purposes and concerns, is, by virtue of its very operation, determining what counts as the facts to be observed.”3 Put differently, a reader, always and already ad- hering to certain public and personal beliefs, decides upon the definite properties of a text. A text thereby represents not the collection of ele- ments, which exemplifies such definite properties, but rather the result of a subjective process, which encodes them. So Fish concludes: “the text is always a function of interpretation”—interpretation now being a reader’s conscious and unconscious intentional evaluation of some apparently liter- ary material.4 Against the formalists, then, Fish locates meaning (ranging from factual description to evaluative interpretation) in the reader as an ef- fect of this reader’s disposition. Two related observations about the process of reading encourage this conclusion. First, Fish censures the formalist’s exclusion of the way in which a text or texts produce sensory reactions in the reader. In his ap- pended introduction to the book, he explains: “[with the first chapter,] I chal- lenged the self-sufficiency of the text by pointing out that its (apparently) spatial form belied the temporal dimension in which its meanings were ac- tualized, and I argued that it was the developing shape of that actualization, rather than the static shape of the printed page, that should be the object of critical description.”5 For example, if the opening line of Mrs. Dalloway (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”) implies one mean- ing to a reader (Mrs. Dalloway’s counterfeit independence), then this mean- ing, even if a different meaning later contradicts it (Mrs. Dalloway’s actual independent purchasing of flowers), nonetheless amounts to one of the text’s possible meanings, and a critic must not ignore its import.6 In other words, Fish rejects any formal distinction between the text and the reader’s response in order to defend the views both that the experience of a text and the text itself are interchangeable and that thereby all possible experi- ences of a text count. 74 Jonathan Michael Dickstein ░ But this refocusing of the interpretative gaze from the text itself to the reader’s response seems merely to expand the formalist’s object—from texts alone to possible experiences of them. While classical formalist critics conclude their interpretations of texts at the level of grammatical, syntacti- cal, and semantic values, more recent formalists (namely, structuralists and narratologists) do not, extending their interpretations to other structures— such as, plot, story, and/or themes. In “From Work to Text” (1971), Roland Barthes argues that, whereas the prior aspects are features of a work, only the latter are features of the text. He writes: “The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a li- brary for example), the Text is a methodological field. … [T]he work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in the movement of a discourse.”7 Barthes’ notion of the text then amounts neither to the ma- terial thing (a book on a bookshelf), nor to the computable structures of language (such as, grammar, syntax, or semantics), but to the possible ex- periences readers have while reading. For him, unlike the concrete and definite work, the text is theoretical and dynamic. However, while theoretical and dynamic, Fish worries that such a no- tion of the text only makes the formalist’s object more universal. As he puts it, “the hegemony of formalism was confirmed and even extended by mak- ing the text responsible for the activities of its readers.”8 Barthes’ text amounts not simply to an experience but to the collection of possible expe- riences of reading. Presumably, then, the critic of Barthes’ text may access and assess experiences of reading which are not her/his own. The best critics would thus seem to be those most attuned to the total collection of possible experiences of reading—in other words, those most attuned to the text. Therefore, though addressing not the concrete and definite properties but the theoretical and dynamic effects of writing, Barthes’ notion of the text, as Fish’s argument suggests, preserves the authoritative status of the critic. To avoid this implication, Fish distinguishes between the reader’s re- ception of a text and the reader’s already established social, psychological, and theological inclinations. He argues that such inclinations determine how readers may receive texts: “description can occur only within a stipula- tive understanding of what there is to be described, an understanding that will produce the object of its attention.”9 In other words, if the opening line of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway implies some meaning for a reader (Mrs. Dallo- way’s counterfeit independence), it does so because the reader brings cer- tain social, psychological, and theological convictions to bear on the text. According to Fish, then, a reader, by way of her/his convictions, produces the meaning of a text. ░ The Text in This Class 75 With this conclusion, Fish relinquishes the descriptive aspect of literary criticism in favour of a rhetorical one. He writes: “The business of criti- cism … [is] not to decide between interpretations by subjecting them to the test of disinterested evidence but to establish by political and persuasive means (they are the same thing) the set of interpretative assumptions from the vantage of which the evidence (and the facts and the intentions and everything else) will hereafter be specifiable.”10 That is, critics, Fish claims, should not assess the truth or falsity of interpretations but rather the effec- tiveness of them. If a reader develops and supports some interpretation of the opening line of Mrs. Dalloway (for example, Mrs. Dalloway’s counterfeit independence), s/he does so only to convince others to adopt the method by which s/he came to ascertain this interpretation. In the last instance, then, Fish favours the rhetorical rather than descriptive side of literary criti- cism. A trajectory of early-modern philosophy, evident in the works of Des- cartes and Leibniz, anticipates both the formalist method and Fish’s alter- native and thereby helps to specify both methods and their shortcomings. Prefiguring the formalist theory of literature, René Descartes’ dualistic phi- losophy attempts to ground an interpretative method by which one may as- sess the distinct properties of the non-mental or physical world. As he writes in his aptly titled Discourse on the method of rightly conducting rea- son and seeking the truth in the sciences (1637), “the principles of these sciences [namely, any science with a theoretical basis in mathematics (such as, geometry, algebra, astronomy, music, and optics)] must all be de- rived from philosophy.”11 In other
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